Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

The solution to the problem of the supervisors at the housing project was fairly simple. And it became apparent even before I had the chance to swing by to pay Fay a visit and forward the mercenary request directly to the headquarters.

The path that I took around the camp, led me straight from the housing development project to the most important part of the entire camp.

A place that would be the king on the board if this camp was a huge match of chess. A location the vitality of which couldn't be overestimated… even though right now it looked like merely a dump for all sorts of construction materials.

The two facts that stood out about this place over most of the other areas in the camp were how all the materials around bore the marks of manufactured origin, and how there wasn't even a single brigade in sight to push the project ahead.

'What the hell,' I thought while squinting my eyes and reaching for my radio.

"High Peter to HQ, High Peter to HQ," I called out, using the call sign Makary assigned to me in some sort of a childish prank.

Apparently high was a military lingo for someone of great importance while using my name allowed me to narrow the precision of the callsign down to just me amidst the sea of people in the camp.

"Headquarters to High Peter, we copy," a voice filled with static reached back from the radio after a short moment.

'Right, everything here that works is taped together with hopes and prayers. It would be stupid to expect good quality communication…'

Holding back a slightly annoyed sigh, I raised the radio back to my mouth.

"I'm currently at the gateway project. And while there's a whole lot of materials around, I can't see a single brigade working on it! Is there some sort of miscommunication? And regardless of why no one is here, we need to put some brigades here right now."

"Headquarter copy, please hold."

Annoyed by the situation before me, I lowered the radio and waited for the response.

The gateway project. The one project that the whole camp was built around. The project that we absolutely had to finish in merely a few hours if we wanted to boost the throughput rate of our logistics.

For the pile of resources scattered over an empty plain was to turn into the house for my stationary gate.

"Headquarters to High Peter, do you copy?"

The voice rang on my radio again.

"Yeah, go on."

"There was some confusion with the orders for the seventh supervisor's group. We are sending over all four of his brigades right now, over."

"Thanks, great job out there," I called back before putting the radio down and hanging it back on my belt.

"I guess I'm done here?"

With new and priority-level work found, the headquarters could pull four brigades out of the housing project, making the manpower over there slightly more manageable for the project supervisor.

And as important as the gateway project was, there was no need for me to stick around and wait for the workers to appear.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

I wasn't an architect to tell them what to build nor an engineer to tell them how to build.

I was here just to see how things were going and help solve any problems that arose since yesterday.

"Well then, I guess it's time for me to head back," I muttered to myself, mentally patting myself on the shoulder as I turned around and followed down the path beaten into the ground by the overwhelming weight of various trucks, quads, excavators, and other vehicles.

Knowing better than to risk my skin, I made sure to swing by the open-air stockpile with all of the food supplies before pretty much blackmailing the mercenary there with my authority to give me some supplies… Only to have him look at me as if I was some sort of idiotic prankster when I revealed what I actually needed.

'As it turns out, the condensed milk isn't all that popular with the soldiers, who could've known?'

A treat that I considered a great delicacy was apparently too sweet for the palates of the majority of the soldiers, making the canned condensed milk one of the few foods that the mercenaries actively hated. Experience new stories with empire

But between my designs at caramelizing it and my responsibility to bring some over while I was out to visit Fay at the headquarters, I had little to no choice but to get my hands on at least a few of those cans.

With this small distraction out of the way, I hurried all the way back to the temporary headquarters. There, the work was going exactly the same way it happened yesterday, with a sizeable crowd of people working with tons of paper and trying to keep the whole camp going with the help of simple communication devices.

And more or less in the middle of the entire group, there was a huge and mostly empty desk, where Fay and one of Makary's officers continued to throw paper around.

'Are they sorting it or actually solving the issues?' I thought, approaching the table in silence as I watched how the two worked at an extremely respectable if not outright enviable pace.

Looking down, I watched how Fay would pick up a paper, quickly scan it with her eyes, and then throw it to one of seven different piles. And even though I've read many, many times more than Fay ever had the chance to, she moved those papers at a rate that made it actually challenging for me to read it through as she went!

Unable to properly make my own judgment on the papers I couldn't fully read, I failed to figure out the scheme Fay used to judge which paper went to which pile.

Still, her methods appeared not to be perfect, with how Makary's officer sitting on the other side of the table would occasionally throw a paper from the pile he was responsible for over to another pile, proving that in the case of this particular report, Fay's assessment was wrong.

In the end, though, even if Fay made some small mistakes, one couldn't blame her for it given the turnover of the reports. The task that only appeared to keep on growing yesterday, when we had a total of six people working on it, was, at the very least, not growing with only Fay and the officer working super hard to manage it.

'Is it them getting used to the task?' I asked myself before opting not to distract either of them when they were so focused.

Making sure not to make even the tiniest noise, I moved a bit down the table to not enter Fay's peripheral vision when I left the cans down on the table.

I promised to deliver her some canned milk, and I've just completed this task. And with my refusal to force Fay out of her state of focus, there was little more I could do around, especially with the rest of my to-do waiting for its completion and Leon's visit looming over my head.

Yet, the very moment I swung around, the high-pitched noise of the bell rang in the air again, announcing it was finally time for dinner.

'Wait, so soon?' Startled by the timing, I pulled out my phone and checked the time… Only to realize that it's been five hours since the waking call!

'Did I really spend that long on just those two projects alone?'

Between talking to the workers on the site and then dealing with the lack of workers on the gateway project site, I would expect that in the worst-case scenario, completing those two tasks would take me two hours, three hours tops. And even all the other distractions that I busied myself with…

'Did I really waste two hours trying to get the canned, condensed milk for Fay?' I thought, gulping down my saliva when I suddenly felt an intense stare piercing my back.

"Don't worry, dear," Fay spoke the very moment I turned around. She had a wide although slightly troubled smile on her lips. "We've decided to push today's dinner an hour earlier, not to mess anything up during Leon's visit."

How did Fay recognize the source of my surprise and then worry at a mere glance? That question, I couldn't even guess the answer that I could properly acknowledge as something possible.

Was it our bond? But I didn't feel her peering into my soul deep enough to actually feel my thoughts over just my raw emotions.

Did she notice me taking a look at my phone's clock? Or maybe she just managed to hit a bulls-eye with her guess?

"Thanks for telling," I responded before stretching my hand out and pointing at the cans, "condensed milk, as promised."

Fay threw her eyes to the side, only for her smile to turn mellow and her eyes to fill with affection when she looked back.

"Then… how about we go and get the dinner together?" Fay suggested while standing up and leaving her workstation.

"Not only we can give all the workers an example of following the timeline…" Fay continued to speak as she got closer and closer, all the way to the point where she pressed her face against my chest, only to wrap her hands around my neck and pull herself up, standing on her tiptoes when she reached with her mouth to my ear.

"And if you want, I might share some of my milk with you."